Vladimir Putin: The coldest warrior

LAST week the widow of the murdered dissident Alexander Litvinenko denounced David Cameron for cosying up to Vladimir Putin ahead of this week’s G8 summit. Her husband died an agonising death in London in 2006 after being poisoned with the radioactive substance polonium-210, and Moscow has refused to extradite the man the police believe was responsible.

Marina Litvinenko says we should not be embracing the Russian president as if nothing were amiss while a family friend adds: “It’s a licence to kill essentially. It means Putin has impunity to kill people in the centre of London.”

For them the one consolation of our Prime Minister’s icy press conference with Putin at the weekend must be that nobody is using words like “cosy” any more. There were no smiles and precious little eye contact between the two men after their talks at 10 Downing Street, where they had clashed over Syria.

Russia continues to give military support to the dictator Bashar al-Assad, currently embroiled in a civil war in which nearly 100,000 people have died including 1,700 children under 10.

In a bid to deflect criticism Putin tried to turn the tables on Cameron, who wants to arm the rebels. “Blood is on the hands of both parties,” he said through a translator. “One should hardly back those who kill their enemies and eat their organs. In Russia we cannot imagine such things happening.”

Whitehall correspondents have been describing this language as “harsh and undiplomatic”. That’s another way of saying that Putin wasn’t playing the game of making nice in public as political leaders are meant to do when they meet.

But if we’ve learned one thing about the former spy chief it’s that he doesn’t play by normal rules. He became president in 2000 and by law had to step down after two four-year terms. So he swapped jobs with his protégé and prime minister Dmitri Medvedev. He returned as president for another six years once the law was changed to allow a longer term and seems set to stay in power until 2024.

This is the man who brought his labrador Koni to his first meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel because he had heard she had a phobia of dogs since being bitten as a child. “The dog doesn’t bother you, does it?” he sadistically asked, knowing full well it did. And this was a leader with whom he ought to have a good rapport, given that he had been posted to her native East Germany in his KGB days and they are each fluent in the other’s language.

So US Secretary of State John Kerry can’t have been too surprised when he arrived in Moscow last month for talks on Syria and was kept waiting for three hours in a Kremlin anteroom before Putin would deign to see him.

His wife of 30 years, former air hostess Lyudmila, once described him as a vampire. In return he said anyone who could spend three weeks with her deserved a national monument. It shocked no one when they revealed a fortnight ago they were divorcing. The only surprise was they were finally coming clean when the marriage had clearly been on the rocks for years.

Vladimir Putin's wife Lyudmila

Blood is on the hands of both parties

Vladimir Putin

The son of a policeman, Putin was born in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) in 1952. He studied law at university then joined the KGB where one of his jobs was to monitor foreign visitors and consular officials. He married Lyudmila in 1983 and soon afterwards was posted to Dresden. She complained to a biographer that she was expected to lug all her shopping up several flights of stairs to their tower block flat even when seven months pregnant with the second of their two daughters.

Back in Russia a car crash left her with several broken bones. Her husband was busy so sent a junior aide to the hospital with flowers.

For most of the Nineties he was on the staff of St Petersburg’s mayor then joined Boris Yeltsin’s Kremlin in 1997, ­rising to be head of the FSB, which replaced the KGB.

Appointed prime minister by Yeltsin then anointed as his successor, he represented a ­welcome break from the chaotic era of dodgy privatisations which saw the rise of the fabulously wealthy ­oligarch class.

His youth and sobriety made a favourable contrast to the drunken Yeltsin while the rising prosperity which has made Moscow one of the world’s most expensive cities restored a sense of national prestige and sealed his popularity with the public.

He eased liberals out of government, replacing them with hardline allies or neutral yes-men. He jailed Yeltsin-era oligarchs such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky if they attempted to interfere in politics, then set about building a personality cult. He was photographed rolling in the snow with huskies and baring a muscular chest. He was seriously unamused when he thought Dobby the House Elf from the Harry Potter films was a caricature of him.

He released a judo DVD (reminding us he is a black belt) and has befriended unsmiling, macho Hollywood action man Steven Seagal, as well as offering Russian nationality to tax-exile French actor Gérard ­Depardieu, who said this week Putin loves his “hooligan spirit”.

He has carried this carefully ­cultivated Rambo image into a bullish political agenda at home and abroad. The Russian parliament has just introduced a draconian law cracking down on homosexuality and another introducing forced labour for anyone offending the feelings of religious believers.

Putin's alleged girlfriend Alina Kabaeva, who is 30 years his junior

During the invasion of Georgia in 2008 he threatened to hang President Mikheil Saakashvili “by his b****”, and he has railed at American hypocrisy over human rights because of US policy at Guantanamo Bay. “Not only are prisoners detained without charge they walk around shackled like in the Middle Ages,” he said. “They legalised ­torture in their own ­country. Can you imagine if we had anything like that here?”

Even when asked about his alleged girlfriend Alina Kabaeva, the ex-gymnast 30 years his junior whom he is rumoured to have been seeing for years, there is no trace of a twinkle in his eye or a thaw in the personal ­permafrost.

On a trip to Italy he warned journalists: “I have a private life in which I do not permit interference. It must be respected… I always thought badly of those who go around with their erotic fantasies, sticking their snot-ridden noses into another person’s life.”

In that context, our own Prime Minister perhaps got off lightly just being accused of offering solace to cannibals.